Tuesday, October 24, 2017

UAlberta Libraries: Open in Order to …

This week we’re celebrating Open Access Week 2017! The theme this year is “Open in order to _____”, so we thought we’d take some time to highlight some of the ways we support open access all year long.

The University of Alberta Libraries supports open in order to…

-make results of our researchers’ hard work available and visible to everyone, including other researchers, policy-makers, practitioners, students, and the general public,
-contribute to fair and equitable access to information for the widest possible audience,
-reduce the costs of education for students, and
-remove barriers to sharing and reusing research.

What are some of the ways we do this?

Our people:

We are experts in “open.” Our team helps researchers and students across the University navigate the world of open access, open data, and open education. Watch for workshops and events, or contact your subject librarian with specific questions. Throughout the Libraries, supporting open access, open data, and open education through our many diverse roles - from copyright and licensing expertise, to metadata and discovery work - is part of what we do every single day.

Our open access institutional repository:

The University of Alberta’s institutional repository, ERA: Education and Research Archive (and ERA A+V) provides free and open access to the University of Alberta’s intellectual output, including journal articles written by UofA researchers, theses and dissertations by UofA graduate students, reports, conference proceedings, posters, datasets, and more.

ERA is an easy, convenient, and no-cost way for faculty to make their research open! For help depositing your work in ERA contact erahelp@ualberta.ca.

Our open publishing and digitization initiatives:

For more than 10 years, the UofA Libraries have been publishing open access journals, and now provide free-of-charge journal hosting for any open access Canadian journal. This service has expanded to include more than 45 titles, representing a diverse range of subject areas, from important local and Canadian journals to student and community publications. Using the open source software, Open Journal Systems, we've helped editorial teams publish thousands of articles, all freely accessible for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and students around the world.

We also have been working hard to make important materials from our collections and partner libraries open and available through an extensive digitization program. Our Peel’s Prairie Provinces website hosts thousands of historic photos, newspapers, books and pamphlets we’ve digitized. Many collections once hidden on our shelves are now available online, open and free for anyone.

Open data:

Not only do we share ourown data, such as expenditures, metadata, and usage statistics, we also help researchers find and use open datasets, and provide them with the tools to share their own data with others. You can find many UofA researchers’ datasets in our data repository Dataverseand we have been important partners in major national research data initiatives like Portage, promoting shared national stewardship of data resources.